Alona Rodeh

Positive Feedback Loops: reflections of cultural workers working in non-cultural organizations

Alona Rodeh will present her work in progress at the Berlin Fire Brigade. As a part of ZK/U's Artist Dis-Placement residency, dedicated to artists working in non-cultural organizations, Alona is joining the fire brigade on their missions for the past 6 months and until end of June. The studio presentation will include video snippets, 2d sketches and an open discussion with Gilly Karjevsky and Jan Van Esch.

Gilly Karjevsky, a curator in the fields of urban develpment, art and architecture will give a short talk about her experience with "The City Artist", a residency format of artsts working in Israeli municipalities. Her talk will be followed by an open discussion with Jan Van Esch, currently at ZK/U artist in residence at the German Red Cross, and Rodeh herself.

Julim Rosa & Nathan Gray

Julim & Gray Present a DUO Show

Julim Rosa & Nathan Gray will present four works that approach the same territory from different directions. In the OPENHAUS of May the complementary works will be presented in the cellar.  

Julim’s Stop Hiding Your Desire is an ongoing collection of empty billboards from around the world and Gray’s Eighty CRT Self Portraits is a slideshow of images from eBay and Gumtree that show the seller as reflected in the CRT TV that they are trying to sell. Both works collect the absence of an image on a structure intended for display thus revealing their potential to be images themselves or create images in other ways.

Julim’s Better and Gray’s Ball Hits Camera approach the territory from more violent trajectories. Better documents the destruction of the phrase Todo Puede Estar Mejor (Everything could be better) that is painted on the wall of a building that is being demolished and Ball Hits Camera is a collection of moments from online videos where the camera is struck, dropped or hit in continued attempts to break the figurative fourth wall.

Maj Horn

The Physical Archive

Being interested in the rich history of art in the squares, parks and neighborhoods of Berlin, Maj Horn will for the OPENHAUS invite the visitors to participate actively in the testing of a new mapping and knowledge-sharing strategy, dealing with questions related to public art: How do we individually experience and remember art works? Do we know what the art is saying and to whom? How much do we in every day register the art in the public realm? And how is the art connected to its surroundings?

Tori Abernathy

When I observe ____, I feel ____. ____ because I need/value ____. Would you be willing to ____?

For this Openhaus, Tori Abernathy will present a series of fantastical objects that might actually have come from a point in the future (exact location unknown) where radical softness has become normalized. Or maybe, the objects are now ritual artifacts from the period of resistance that led humanity to this point. Or actually, the objects are tools that SWIM made use of yesterday.

Zwoisy Mears-Clarke

How to Greet Like a Jamaican: Step 2

In this work, Zwoisy offers, as the host, an invitation to a dinner of intercultural exchange. Served will be some of the traditional cuisine of his motherland, Jamaica. >From setting the table to providing the conversation starter, there is an attempt to gather the historical traces we each have and the way in which they shaped how we act out 'hospitality' nowadays. For this black man's body of the African Diaspora (the artist's body), the work concerns itself with colonialist traces and therein the skills passed down through the generations of skills chiseled into domestic slaves to Zwoisy's parents' manners to his kitchen in Berlin. The questions of "How did we learn to serve?", "Who did we serve", "Who do I choose to serve?" and "How do I serve?" become intertwined.

Jason Wee

Ghost Architectures

There is a tradition among the Chinese in Southeast Asia to burn paper-based architectural designs in order to transmogrify them into ghostly spaces for the dearly departed. In an ongoing project work Jason Wee explores these traditions with his background in architectual design. The work is a re-imagination of these ephemeral spaces as a kind of modular, flexible architecture, ever adaptable to the needs of the haunted. 

Power Makes us Sick

How Are You Feeling Today?

Most of us are not doctors and some of us can’t go to the doctor, but everything that is living will at some point fall ill. Although we prefer to thrive amongst the well, illness rests like the other side of the coin. And in another way, we are all sick under late capitalism or, we are all sick when alienated from our activity, from the places where we rest, from one another, from ourselves. We are all crazy when someone or something else has the ability to diagnose us against our will. When the air we breathe is toxic, we all suffer indeterminately. 'Health' is something so unclear to us that we only understand it as the absence of the symptoms. PMS is developing an accountability model for health that would help us strengthen the modes of informal support towards our mental, physical, and social health that already exist within and between our own communities. As we learn to take care of one another’s health the state can’t but fail, or at least we would no longer be bothered if it did. For How Are You Feeling Today?, PMS will facilitate a playful discussion to dissect the vocabulary of sickness and illness. We will close with a visualization exercise towards an aspirational of ‘health’.